The gentrification of Washington DC: how my city changed its colours

Author Uzodinma Iweala was born in Washington DC, and says the city is in my blood, my diction and my style. But how has the city he loves, and where his mother and father worked, changed since his birth?

The last time I returned to Washington DC, I arrived as I usually do, by train into Union Station. It was the end of March, the day before Easter Sunday, and the platforms teemed with travellers coming into town to see the citys cherry blossoms, gifted to the city more than a hundred years ago by the mayor of Tokyo.

The colonnade of delicately blossomed trees along the Tidal Basin walkway to the Jefferson Memorial is a historical and aesthetic delight for visitors; but for me, as a child, they were a harbinger of Washingtons aggressive hay fever season. When I was in high school, I would do my best to run speed workouts on the track while inhaling my own snot and wheezing through pollen-aggravated wind pipes. As an adult, I discovered Claritin and my whole world changed.

When I return by train, weather permitting, I often walk the mile-and-a-half from Union Station to the White House along Constitution Avenue before catching an Uber home, just to reacquaint myself with some of the structures and institutions that make my city so unique.

Here are the Smithsonian Museum buildings, many of which I entered as a child on school field trips. This is the majestic, David Adjaye-designed African American History Museum, so long overdue. There is the Washington monument in marble of two shades because the civil war disrupted its construction. Here is the White House, where the most powerful man in the world resides for a few months longer, a black man like me. This is the Federal Reserve, which for conspiracy theorists is the ultimate arbiter of all our fates. And here are the paths one million people marched along to hear Dr Martin Luther King preach for an end to Americas love affair with structured hate.

As usually happens during spats between the branches of the federal government, DC got tossed around in the middle, and ended up being stripped of its little sovereignty when President Clinton and the Republicans agreed to appoint a control board to oversee city finances.

As with many American urban centres that have seen financial hardship, this meant corporate executives making hardnosed decisions to cut services and save money. One of the casualties was DC General, the citys public hospital, which served lower-income communities across the district. After DC Generals closure, hospitals such as Providence saw an increase in patients from some of the citys more neglected areas, and it wasnt pretty. We saw a lot more gunshot wounds. We saw much more in terms of drug addiction and alcoholism, my father told me.

The worst was that hospitals in Northwest such as George Washington University Hospital where President Reagan was treated after John Hinckleys attempt to assassinate him, and where my youngest brother now works as a resident orthopaedic surgeon would illegally turn these patients away by telling them they could not treat their problems. How can you do that? Its not right! Its reprehensible, my father told me, his voice still brimming with anger many years later.

They could do it because of a dissonance at the core of Washington DCs existence. The people turned away didnt fit the whitewashed image of the marketable city, even though they were the majority of the population. It was the same reason my siblings and I were able to attend posh schools that could achieve a black student enrolment of 10% in a city more than 60% African American, and find those figures cause for celebration.

At the time, property values were much lower. Ismaels parents bought their row house in the 1980s for less than $100,000 (75,000). His mother was recently offered over a million in cash for that same property.

Whats changed? Quite simply, more and more sections of DC are beginning to look the way city has always thought it looked. I remember one visit to Ismaels neighbourhood where he pointed to a house at the end of the block with a rainbow flag flying from its porch. There are some gay guys living there now, he said.

This was the mid-1990s so being gay was still a big deal. It was also a harbinger of change; an almost textbook sign that gentrification was on its way. First wealthy but socially unacceptable white people who nobody wants to live next to find acceptance among black people who nobody has ever wanted to live next to. Then, years later, Im more likely to run into a white college classmate on the way back from grocery shopping tote bag slung over her shoulder, kale leaves peaking over the edge than I am to see one of Ismaels old neighbours who can speak to the rise and fall and rise of a community that has always been integral to the citys life.

As Ismael put it one afternoon a couple of years ago when he, Aaron and I sat at Hooters in Chinatown salivating over the chicken wings: When we were in high school, our white classmates used to come here with fake IDs to buy alcohol for their parties, and I didnt like that. Now they live here and they dont like that my mum does too.

Gentrification is a tough topic to consider, especially given that my education, income and love for kale means I am demographically a gentrifier myself. For the gentrifiers and those in neighbourhoods being gentrified, there are contradictory emotions caused by the interplay of race, class and ambition in the winner-takes-all pursuit of constant growth that we have termed urban renewal.

Like many major cities built around a humming economic engine (LA has entertainment, New York has finance, my city has the ever-growing, ever-giving federal government), DC is an epicentre for urban renewal and thus a locus of intense debate and discomfort around how this change impacts the soul of the city.

DCs economic transformation began when Anthony Williams, the control board-backed chief financial officer of the city was elected mayor in 1999. In his two terms, Williams brought over $40bn of investment to the city. Coupled with an expanding federal government during the presidencies of George W Bush and Barack Obama, this led to an unprecedented increase in population, increased pressure on existing housing stock, and a demographic transformation that has seen Washingtons African American population decrease by 7.3% while the white population has increased by 17.8% over the last 15 years.

Washingtons new younger, often whiter money meets its older darker residents in a process that has accelerated under two subsequent mayors, and resulted in the conundrums facing places like the H Street Northeast corridor, where my friend and original New Yorker Mary lived during her time at Georgetown Law School and where an influx of students, hipsters and Hill staffers has brought new economic life, but also the possibility of cultural erasure, to another historically black subsection of the city.

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One morning in late 2015 when visiting Mary to attend her law school graduation ceremony, plagued by jet lag, I slipped out of her house early to take a walk around her neighbourhood. As the sun rose, I steered clear of the new hipster pubs and draft beer houses on H Street, and instead followed side streets where aged row houses stooped towards the sidewalk.

I nodded to a dreadlocked man waxing a large SUV. I felt myself being watched, followed. From across the road, a man and a woman cat-called me. I pretended not to hear and continued my stroll, but they crossed the street to stand on the sidewalk in front of me.